The ferry ride to Rhodes took an excruciatingly long 16 hours, nicknamed the ferry ride to hell. The boat stopped at all these different islands on the way for a only a few minutes and the boat was old so it did not have a good selection of things to keep one busy. We did meet a nice young lad from Slovakia who was 20 and was like a young lost puppy. He had been working on Crete for the summer, was returning to Slovakia for school but doing some traveling on the way. He had never been to any of the islands before and on top of everything was leaving a Greek girlfriend on Crete. We took him under our wings and made sure he did not get lost or jump over the side of the boat during the journey.
We arrived at Rhodes at a little after midnight with some new American friends, a grand daughter and her grandmother, who had been traveling through Europe for a few weeks. They did not have a place to stay so they came with us to our place that we had booked the day before because we knew we were arriving late. There was no space at our hostel so the owner pointed them in the direction of another pension. We wished them well and said goodbye.
The next day we headed down the port to see about a ferry to Turkey. We decided to go to Fethiye, Turkey instead of Marimara because we wanted to take the Blue Cruise. Of course the only day the ferry did not make the trip was Wednesday, the current day so we bought our tickets for a 4:00pm Thursday departure and set out to explore Rhodes. Rhodes is a neat city to explore, at least the old town part, all the medieval architecture that is still occupied. Oldest occupied medieval city in Europe and it lives up to its billing. We also decided to find another place to stay since the one the night before was too expensive. We wandered the tiny, narrow streets of Rhodes and fell upon Mike’s and Mammas Pension. Mike was an interesting, free spirit kind of guy who plastered the outside of his pension with messages of love and also why he would never sell his beloved pension. Seemed like our kind of place to we booked the rooftop double for 25 euros and went to fetch our stuff from the other hotel. Along the way we ran into Allison and Lucy, the grand daughter and grand mother from the night before. Turns out they found a nice place to stay and were leaving for Turkey on Friday. We chatted, compared notes on the expensiveness of Rhodes and said our goodbyes as they sipped Starbucks coffee.
We but some dinner at the grocery store and ate on the roof top of Mike’s place while watching the sunset. The next day we toured around a little waiting for our ferry and again ran into Allison and Lucy. I gave them some directions and we shared contact information. I picked up our laundry that I dropped off the night before and we headed for the ferry. We caught a hydrofoil to Turkey on rough seas that took about 2.5 hours instead of 90 minutes. Welcome to Turkey!
